Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I have one advantage over the Minister of State in that I travelled on the old Harcourt Street railway line before it was abandoned and sold precipitously. It was way too slow when they decided to reopen it and parts of it had been built on. There is a salutary message in this. Why did they close it? They said they would not have the passengers. They say the same thing about Limerick to Galway and Athenry to Claremorris. As I said, the people come.

The second thing is that I am always amused when people start mentioning the DART in an answer on Galway because there is no DART in Galway. It reminds me of the DART to Dingle, which the Minister of State is probably too young to remember. It was a Celtic tiger joke because of the lack of services in rural Ireland.

The Minister of State might clarify the following point to me: what is the role of the Minister if he has no role in any of these things? Every time we put a question to the Department of Transport about anything, we are told the Minister has no role in the matter. I often wonder why we are paying him a salary at all. The Minister of State and I know that the Minister has a role because he who controls the purse controls the policy. We have these extra carriages and I need to know how many of those will be deployed on the Galway to Dublin line.

What will be done to make sure that extra carriages can be deployed on the Limerick to Galway line? On that line people are literally sitting on the floor in the train. This is the line that was not going to carry any passengers. The thing we need is longer platforms, a simple ask. I need to know how many of these extra carriages we will get, when we will get an increase on the services outlined here and what will be done to increase the ability of the Galway to Limerick line to have more capacity to measure up against existing demand, not to mind future demand.

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